Planting a Flag
It became clear to me that trying to get the mainstream news media to publish important information was a losing battle if that information went against the grain of right-wing orthodoxy or mainstream conventional wisdom.
In fact, I had grown tired of trying to convince editors and producers who feared losing their jobs that they had a responsibility to take on such stories and such risks. Beyond exhaustion, I felt guilt when I looked into their eyes and saw how scared they had become, a fear that would sometimes translate into anger at even the suggestion.
My reaction to this grim reality was to look for a place where the flag of honest journalism could be planted and defended. I thought I might have found such a spot with the emergence of the Internet and our creation of the Consortiumnews.com Web site in 1995.
Of course, the downside was that the journalism would not have the large audiences that my work did when I was at the AP or Newsweek or PBS "Frontline." But I thought readership might grow significantly if I were able to raise the necessary money to ensure that our stories got more attention.
That, however, proved more difficult than I had expected. Wealthy progressives remained locked into the thinking of the late 1970s, which held that expenditures on information were wasteful; that reporting the news was somebody else's job. Maybe they believed -- or wanted to believe -- the Right's propaganda about the "liberal" media that, in reality, didn't exist.
Instead, they favored either direct giving (such as helping the poor or buying up endangered wetlands) or support for "organizing" efforts (such as seeking some regulatory change, like curbing money in politics).
I argued instead that the scarce money available should be invested in creating honest content and courageous outlets.
While direct giving was surely noble, it ignored the power of the Right's propaganda machine to undermine any worthy cause. By destroying the New Deal and Great Society, right-wing legislators could create more poor people than any well-intentioned liberal benefactor could feed and house.
Regulation, like restricting money in politics, also might sound good but was either impractical or easily reversible by right-wing judges and politicians. All the money that progressive foundations invested in campaign finance reform was negated in 2010 by one 5-4 decision of a Supreme Court dominated by appointees of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
The hard truth is that there are no shortcuts to correcting the imbalance that now exists in the U.S. political/media system. It will take money, time and energy to build an infrastructure that can successfully challenge the propaganda from the Right. It will also require many on the Left to admit that their judgments over the past three decades have been faulty.
But the consequences of the Right's strategy -- and the Left's miscalculations -- are apparent in the audacity of today's congressional and statehouse Republicans in proposing the virtual repeal of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and even Teddy Roosevelt's progressive era.
The Right feels it is strong enough to impose its Ayn Rand vision of a winner-take-all society and deploy its vast resources to prevail on Election Day.
It is possible that the Republicans have overreached this time, with their ambitious agenda of slashing domestic spending, replacing Medicare with a voucher system, and lavishing more tax reductions on the rich.
But the fact that the Republicans and the Right would even dare undertake such a radical approach is itself proof of how far they believe they have come in controlling government institutions and media outlets, how successfully they have negated the Republic's checks and balances.
To find a route out of this political/media maze, the Democrats and the Left may have to start rewinding the string of history and retracing the steps that got them so lost in the first place.
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